Long Bright River Creators on Book Changes, Amanda Seyfried and Season 2

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Long Bright River,” now streaming on Peacock.

Two years before Liz Moore’s novel “Long Bright River” ever hit shelves in 2020 and became a bestseller — and one of Barack Obama’s top books of the year — she was approached by different producers. Now, it’s an eight-episode Peacock series starring Amanda Seyfried.

“Long Bright River” marks Seyfried’s first series role following her Emmy-winning turn as Elizabeth Holmes in “The Dropout.” Seyfried plays patrol officer Mickey Fitzpatrick as she searches for her younger sister, Kacey (Ashleigh Cummings), amid the opioid crisis in Philadelphia and sex workers being murdered. As Mickey looks for answers about Kacey’s disappearance — and comes to terms with the pain she’s caused her — she reconnects (and falls back in love) with her former partner, Truman (Nicholas Pinnock).

The show is filled with shocking twists in nearly every episode. From the reveal that Mickey’s son Thomas (Callum Vinson) is actually Kacey’s biological child to the serial killer turning out to be Eddie Lafferty (Dash Mihok), the partner that Mickey was assigned in Episode 1, co-creators Moore and Nikki Toscano (“The Offer,” “Detroit 1-8-7”) faithfully carried over many of the book’s biggest moments — while not being married to every detail.

“My inexperience in television writing might have been both a hindrance and hopefully helpful in certain ways because, frankly, I didn’t know what would be hard to do,” Moore tells Variety over a Zoom call. “Nikki has endless set experience, but was very generous in not thinking as a producer when we were writing together. She’s a very experienced writer as well, and good at wearing those two hats separately.”

When Moore and Toscano first met in 2020 about possibly working together, they immediately bonded over the elements from the book that were important to retain: capturing the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia through a nuanced look at substance abuse and sex work, as well as subverting the-cop-as-savior narrative.

“We also really wanted to hold on to this internal character that Mickey was,” Toscano says. “Oftentimes, we get into adaptations of something and then all of a sudden, a character that’s so unique in her internal nature suddenly says what she means and means what she says. The answer became surrounding her with characters who were pulling it out of her.”

Ahead of the show’s release on Thursday, Variety had the opportunity to dive into the adaptation process with both Moore and Toscano, chatting through how they built to Lafferty being the killer, why they were both interested in developing Mickey as “a cop who wasn’t necessarily good at her job” and how Seyfried studied real Kensington cops to nail Mickey’s mannerisms.

You both decided to carry over the flashback structure from the book. How did you think about using act breaks versus chapters in the book?

Nikki Toscano: I think it was less about the act break and more about the fact that the flashbacks were informing the present moment, either supporting or undermining what we were asserting in the present. We were making sure that in examining the murder mystery, we also had to be reflecting on Mickey’s past. The deeper we got into understanding Mickey’s past, the deeper we got into understanding the murder mystery and what her role might be in the ultimate disappearance of her sister. That was what we were governed by.

Since the book is narrated by Mickey, we know right away that Kacey is her sister — the girl with the pink hair that she’s always looking for. But in the show, that information is withheld until the end of Episode 1. Why did you decide to keep that from the audience?

Liz Moore: Another guidepost for us in the show is that Mickey is from the community that she’s patrolling, so she has a really strong familiarity with the residents that she’s in contact with as part of her work. So when she views the community, she’s able to name people that she passed. When she sees her own sister, she’s very private and doesn’t necessarily reveal that to the partner she’s assigned to in this flashback. We see her in a similar way to the way Mickey sees everyone in the neighborhood. We wanted Kacey to register to the viewer as one of many people that Mickey knows on the street. With the reveal, we wanted there to be an emotional rug-pull as well as a story rug-pull.

Toscano: In simultaneously trying to preserve the internal nature of the character, we were tipping our hat to the fact that the person we’re following, Mickey Fitzpatrick, might not be the reliable narrator that we think her to be — because she’s not telling us everything.

In the show, you develop Mickey’s character more with her connection to music that she left behind to be a cop. Why did you add that as part of her backstory?

Moore: We were very interested in the idea of writing a cop who wasn’t necessarily good at her job. In the book, one of the first things she says about herself is that she’s not a good cop, she’s not brave — but she’s smart. She has a little bit of vanity about her intelligence, and I think we carried that through to the series.

Toscano: It’s more visual. In the book, she very much wanted to be a history professor, and that was our way of showing the promise she once had. In our series, she went to Penn for a year: It was an important part of her backstory that she had a shot at a life outside the neighborhood she grew up in, but ultimately kept on getting pulled back in to take care of her sister.

You decided to age her son Thomas up in the series, and also changed Gee, Thomas’ grandparent, from female to male. What inspired those changes?

Moore: One of the reasons that we aged Thomas up is so that Mickey would have another outlet to get some of her internality externalized. She speaks to him in a way that’s often not appropriate — I think she adultifies him in a lot of ways and that, too, is not meant to be a good thing. Arguably, one of her character flaws is not protecting him enough. I think it’s a generational cycle — she was adultified too, very early on, so I think that’s what she does to her son.

Toscano: When we changed the gender of Gee from a woman to a man, we wanted to make Thomas the same age when Gee was beginning to contemplate his legacy. And that was ultimately the reason the ice was able to thaw between Mickey and him.

Getting into some of the show’s biggest twists, it was really surprising to learn that Mickey took Thomas from Kacey to raise him as her own son. But then when you look back, it makes a lot of sense. 

Moore: We wanted to make sure that audiences would have begun to suspect that Mickey wasn’t telling the truth about every aspect of herself, as other characters like her cousin and Truman tell her. The characters that we are trained to see as suspicious end up, in some ways, being the more reliable ones. And I think that mirrors one of the themes of the show, which is that those we perceive to be victims at first may not actually be victims. We played a lot with the idea that being on the right side of the law does not necessarily translate to being on the right side overall. Both sisters reverse themselves constantly throughout the show, and hopefully by the end, both will be perceived as full characters who have made both good and bad choices.

Episode 6, specifically, is quite an emotional whirlwind as we get the low point of Mickey getting beat up on the street. But then we also see her really connect with Thomas and Gee before finding out that her dad is still alive. Nikki, you wrote and directed this episode, how did you approach hitting all these beats without it feeling too dense for viewers?

Toscano: Mickey has spent the entire episode up until this point gunning to find her sister. Then when she gets beat up, she’s forced to take a moment to actually engage with her son, with Gee, with Truman. I think it was allowing an opportunity for the character and the series itself to take a breath from the murder mystery. That being said, that was a jam-packed episode with different reveals, and it was always our intention to allow these reveals to be governed by emotion and not just the need for a rug-pull.

You both talked earlier about having characters pull emotions out of Mickey, and her former partner, Truman, is one of those key characters as someone she is in love with. Another shocking moment comes when Mickey pulls a gun on him in Episode 8 after Kacey tells her he is the killer because of a misunderstanding. How did you justify her getting to that place?

Moore: The paradox that Mickey feels in that moment, and Truman articulates at one point, is that she’s spent most of her adolescence and adulthood disbelieving her sister or not trusting Kacey, not taking Kacey at her word even when she’s telling the truth. For example, with Kacey telling her that Simon is not a good person. So in this moment, she’s in a bind, because she has to choose her sister, she has to believe her, yet all of her instincts tell her that this can’t possibly be true. And so it’s a tragedy. She makes this terrible decision sort of out of necessity, but also because one of Mickey’s weaknesses is that she doesn’t have a strong intuitive sense. It’s one of the things that makes her not a good cop.

Toscano: We were aiming for the heartbreak of these two characters not ultimately ending up together. It doesn’t have a pretty little bow at the end of their story. There’s a glimmer of hope, but Truman can’t come back out of respect to himself.

And of course, the ultimate killer being Mickey’s recent partner, Eddie Lafferty is another strong gut-punch. Especially with how it connects to the show’s overarching themes about cops and abuse of power.

Toscano: In the book, the killer’s motive was more random. We had a lot of conversations about making it more purposeful and come from an emotional place. It was also important that it say something about the show that we were making.

On the topic of what the show is saying about cops, I know that writing the book required a lot of research. Since the book came out in 2020, conversations about police brutality and ethics have only continued to grow. Were there additional nuances you wanted to explore in the years since Black Lives Matter?

Toscano: First and foremost, in the series versus the book, we lean even more into the idea of community-led policing. Mickey’s superpower is the fact that she’s from the community — that she grew up with these women and that Kacey is one of them.

Moore: The series is certainly not afraid to take a look at the way that police officers can do harm in a community, which comes out of the research that I did many years ago at this point, in which I spoke directly to some residents of Kensington, including women doing sex work, about some police officers who did use their power to take advantage of women in the neighborhood. It’s been documented in the Philadelphia Inquirer, but it’s also a trend that you can see elsewhere in the U.S. with alarming irregularity.

What did this cast add to the characters that maybe you hadn’t originally envisioned on the page?

Moore: All of our actors did a lot of research for their roles. Amanda Seyfried, in particular, spoke with two female police officers who work in Kensington and did a ride-along with them. In the process, she developed physical habits and a sort of toughness, physically, that didn’t necessarily exist in the book. In the book, she’s more of a nerd. The character of Mickey is still very internal, she played the English horn, she was a band geek growing up. But I think Amanda was absolutely right that in order to believably portray a cop in Philadelphia, you have to bring more toughness in the way that you speak and carry yourself. She rightfully intuited that from what she picked up from real police officers.

Finally, Amanda Seyfried told my colleague Marc Malkin that she would be interested in returning for Season 2. Is another season possible?

Moore: I feel like that’s classified information.

Toscano: That’s a decision that’s, like, way above our pay grade. So I think we’ll just leave it at that. For both Liz and I, any opportunity to work with these actors again would be awesome, and we would be game to do it in any capacity.

This interview has been edited and condensed.